I haven’t had much time to cartoon since I became a manager of the Drift Inn in January, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t had lots of laughs. Sometimes I feel as though I’m in the middle of a sitcom and Candid Cameras must be lurking somewhere. Take this exchange from the other evening:
“We need more corkscrews,” Tamara, one of our servers said to me during a dinner rush.
“How many do we have?” I asked.
“One.”
“Shouldn’t a restaurant that has a storeroom filled floor to ceiling with wine bottles have more than one corkscrew?” I asked. Continue reading →
10:16 am August 21st was one of the highlights of my year, the moment the moon totally blotted out the sun in my backyard. The lead up to the eclipse was pretty amazing too. “What about the dead bodies?” a local asked. “They’re expecting millions here. Statistically, the number of people who die per million daily must outnumber the number of refrigerators the morgue has.” In the end, only a few thousand came to our county of 45,000. None died that I know of. I think people were scared off by expectations of Highway 101 turning into a parking lot and a 50% chance of clouds. I’m decorating my Christmas tree with Eclipse Glasses. Continue reading →
“What do you really do at the hotel?” is one of the questions I was asked most often this summer at the Overleaf Lodge.
“This is it,” I’d say. “Giving a nature walk and then watching the sunset and whales while tending a camp fire and passing out the fixings for s’mores. Those are my only jobs at the hotel.” Continue reading →
When I woke this morning and saw gray out my window I thought, “Rats. Should have joined the masses who drove east.” August 21st mornings in Waldport, Oregon historically have been cloudy 50% of the time.
Sammy, not understanding my malaise, wanted his usual morning romp, so like most other mornings I poured a cup of coffee into a travel mug and walked the half-mile to the Alsea Bay. When I got there it was so foggy I couldn’t see the bridge. Double rats.
I turned around and could see something shining through the clouds and snapped a picture. Continue reading →
Once upon a time a whale qualified for the United States Olympics Pole Vaulting Team. The Russians objected and accused the U.S. of exploiting a dumb fish for capitalistic purposes.
The whale said in song that he wasn’t a fish, that he was a mammal, and that he wasn’t dumb. To prove the latter he sang Hamlet’s soliloquy. A judging panel of Shakespearian scholars gave him a score of 2 saying it wasn’t the worst recitation they’d ever heard, but it was flawed due to improper inflection. Continue reading →
The arrest of Ahmed Mohamed, the fourteen-year-old who brought a homemade clock to school, made me think of the time I built a clock at my grandparent’s place. I wasn’t arrested, but that’s only because I didn’t follow through on my thoughts of grand-patricide.
Sometime in the late 1960s or early ‘70s when I was at East Lansing High School we learned how to use a slide ruler and—no joke—went on a field trip to see a computer.
When I was a freshman at the University of Michigan in 1974 I was one of only a handful of students who had a calculator in my introductory physics class. It was a Texas Instrument SR-10, a graduation gift from my parents that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Such calculating power! And it only cost a little over $100, about a quarter of what U of M then charged in-state students per semester. Continue reading →
Sometime this winter I will get my fifteen minutes of fame—well, after editing, probably three minutes of fame leaving me 12 minutes for some later date. Last month I got a call from Mark Kachelries, a producer with the Travel Channel’s TV series, Mysteries at the Museum. In each show Don Wildman, putting on his best Indiana Jones persona, tells stories and interspersed throughout are historic reenactments and comments from experts. Mark wondered if they could interview me.
I’m an expert on something? I know what you’re thinking. “She’s obviously lost it. Do they still send out men in white to cart people to the insane asylum?” Continue reading →
The New Yorker Has Stopped Sending Me Rejection Slips … Sort Of
New Yorker Rejection
“Of course I draw for the New Yorker” is the reply I give to the question I’m most often asked as a cartoonist, “but they’ve never bought anything of mine.”
When I started cartooning professionally in 1981 I submitted a batch of cartoons to the New Yorker every week for a few years. At the time I thought they were great, but now I can see that most were terrible. I stopped submitting to them when I started only drawing commissioned work.
Last month for the first time in decades I drew a batch of ‘toons for my own amusement, bought 200 large envelopes, and hired a monk scribe. Monk scribes are cheaper than ink cartridges because you need only keep them in wine. Any kind of wine will do: even my friend’s unpalatable but potent home brew. Continue reading →
On February 10, 2015, I sent this email to Paul Clerc, Watermelon Web Works top web guru.
Dear Paul:
In my next email, I am attaching a draft of a series of twenty blog posts titled: Watermelon Web Works Review. I am posting Part 1 on February 17, the one-year anniversary of my new site going live.
I am still editing the posts, fixing typos, tweaking this, tweaking that, and trying to inject as much humor as I can in what is otherwise a sad story, but the gist will stay the same.
I will publish any comments you would like to make in their entirety and unedited.
I started writing the series on July 22, 2014. We’d had a series of email exchanges that day and you said the utter failure of the new site was “in NO WAY our fault.” The caps are yours, not mine. The entire email is in Part 13 of the review.
If you’d instead said, “I’m sorry,” I probably wouldn’t have written a review or at any rate, not one that’s almost eighty pages long.
You were always encouraging me to blog. Consider your advice taken.
Sincerely yours,
Theresa (T-) McCracken
humble cartoonist and reluctant blogger
Next: Paul’s Response
Computer Cartoons for use in magazines, websites, etc. So cheap you can afford them even if you’ve paid your web designer way too much.
Watermelon Web Works Review Part 20: Paul Clerc’s Response
Over the past nineteen days, I’ve written a detailed account of my experience with Watermelon Web Works, the company that redesigned my website.
At about 6:00 p.m. on February 10, 2015, one week before I posted Part 1 of this series, I sent Paul Clerc, Watermelon’s top web guru, an advance copy of the blog posts. I said I would post any comments he had in their entirety and unedited.
